Right way of using Google Storage on a GCE VM - google-cloud-storage

I want to know the right/best way of having one machine copying data to Google Storage.
I need one machine to be able to write to a bucket, but not be able to create or delete other buckets.
While researching, I found out that you should create a account service so this account can log in to GC and then use the storage.
But the problem is, when the machine is from GCE, there are scopes. When setting up the scope "Default" it can Read from Google Storage, but can not write to it. Even after authenticated with a service account.
When the scope is Devstorage.read_write now the machine can create and remove buckets from that storage without login. I find that to risk.
Does anyone have any recommendations?
Thanks

The core problem here is that the "write" scope covers both write and delete, and that the GCE service account is likely a member of project-editors, which can create and delete buckets. It sounds like what you want to do is restrict a service account to only being able to affect a single bucket. You should be able to do this with these steps:
Create a service account in your project (and save the private key file).
In the permissions page for the project, make sure that service account is not a project editor for your project.
Using an account that does have full permissions to your project, create the bucket, then grant the service account write access to the bucket. Example gsutil commands to do this:
gsutil mb gs://yourbucket
gsutil acl ch -u your-service-account-name#gserviceaccount.com:W gs://yourbucket
Create a VM that does not have a GCE service account enabled.
Push the service account's private key file to that VM.
On the VM, gcloud auth activate-service-account --key-file=your-key-file.json
Now gsutil commands run on the VM should be able to write to (and delete) objects in that bucket, but not any other buckets in your project.

Related

gcs fuse on two seperate instances

So I have two separate accounts I'm sharing a gcloud bucket between. At first I had problems getting the credentials right but eventually I just added all the email-looking accounts under the IAM on the second account to the storage buckets permissions. I gave those accounts all the roles, as I want to be able to read and write from both accounts vm instances. At this point I can mount using gcsfuse, But I can't read or write to it? I can see the filesystem, but anytime I try to copy from or to I get a input/output error?

Use only a domain and disable https://storage.googleapis.com url access

I am newbie at cloud servers and I've opened a google cloud storage to host image files. I've verified my domain and configured it, to view images via my domain. The problem is, same file is both accessible via my domain example.com/images/tiny.png and also via storage.googleapis.com/example.com/images/tiny.png Is there any solution to disable access via storage.googleapis.com and use only my domain?
Google Cloud Platform Support Version:
NOTE: This is the reply from Google Cloud Platform Support when contacted via email...
I understand that you have set up a domain name for one of your Cloud Storage buckets and you want to make sure only URLs starting with your domain name have access to this bucket.
I am afraid that this is not possible because of how Cloud Storage permission works.
Making a Cloud Storage bucket publicly readable also gives each of its files a public link. And currently this public link can’t be disabled.
A workaround would be implement a proxy program and running it on a Compute Engine virtual machine. This VM will need a static external IP so that you can map your domain to it. The proxy program will be in charged of returning the requested file from a predefined Cloud Storage bucket while the bucket keeps to be inaccessible to the public.
You may find these documents helpful if you are interested in this workaround:
1. Quick start to set up a Linux VM (1).
2. Python API for accessing Cloud Storage files (2).
3. How to download service account keys to grant a program access to a set of services (3).
4. Pricing calculator for getting a picture on how much a VM may cost (4).
(1) https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/quickstart-linux
(2) https://pypi.org/project/google-cloud-storage/
(3) https://cloud.google.com/iam/docs/creating-managing-service-account-keys
(4) https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/
My Version:
It seems the solution to this question is really a simple, just FUSE Google Cloud Storage with VM Instance.
After FUSE private files from GCS can be accessed through VM's IP address. It made Google Cloud Storage Bucket act like a directory.
The detailed documentation about how to setup FUSE in Google Cloud is here.
There is but it requires you to do more work.
Your current solution works because you've made access to the GCS bucket (example.com), public and then you're DNS aliasing from your domain.
An alternative approach would be for you to limit access to the GCS bucket to one (possibly several) accounts and then run a web-server that uses one of the accounts to access your image files. You could then also either permit access to your web-server to anyone or also limit access to it.
More work for you (and possibly cost) but more control.

Recovering access after initially provisioning wrong scopes for an instance

I recently created a VM, but mistakenly gave the default service account Storage: Read Only permissions instead of the intended Read Write under "Identity & API access", so GCS write operations from the VM are now failing.
I realized my mistake, so following the advice in this answer, I stopped the VM, changed the scope to Read Write and started the VM. However, when I SSH in, I'm still getting 403 errors when trying to create buckets.
$ gsutil mb gs://some-random-bucket
Creating gs://some-random-bucket/...
AccessDeniedException: 403 Insufficient OAuth2 scope to perform this operation.
Acceptable scopes: https://www.googleapis.com/auth/cloud-platform
How can I fix this? I'm using the default service account, and don't have the IAM permissions to be able to create new ones.
$ gcloud auth list
Credentialed Accounts
ACTIVE ACCOUNT
* (projectnum)-compute#developer.gserviceaccount.com
I will suggest you to try add the scope "cloud-platform" to the instance by running the gcloud command below
gcloud alpha compute instances set-scopes INSTANCE_NAME [--zone=ZONE]
[--scopes=[SCOPE,…] [--service-account=SERVICE_ACCOUNT
As a scopes put "https://www.googleapis.com/auth/cloud-platform" since it give Full access to all Google Cloud Platform resources.
Here is gcloud documentation
Try creating the Google Cloud Storage bucket with your user account.
Type gcloud auth login and access the link you are provided, once there, copy the code and paste it into the command line.
Then do gsutil mb gs://bucket-name.
The security model has 2 things at play, API Scopes and IAM permissions. Access is determined by the AND of them. So you need an acceptable scope and enough IAM privileges in order to do whatever action.
API Scopes are bound to the credentials. They are represented by a URL like, https://www.googleapis.com/auth/cloud-platform.
IAM permissions are bound to the identity. These are setup in the Cloud Console's IAM & admin > IAM section.
This means you can have 2 VMs with the default service account but both have different levels of access.
For simplicity you generally want to just set the IAM permissions and use the cloud-platform API auth scope.
To check if you have this setup go to the VM in cloud console and you'll see something like:
Cloud API access scopes
Allow full access to all Cloud APIs
When you SSH into the VM by default gcloud will be logged in as the service account on the VM. I'd discourage logging in as yourself otherwise you more or less break gcloud's configuration to read the default service account.
Once you have this setup you should be able to use gsutil properly.

working with Google Cloud Storage without gsutil

I have developed a Software in which is configured directories to save files. I run it on Linux. These directories are informed by config file.
I would like to use compute engine nodes because I need to increase its performance. Therefore, I would like to use Google Storage to save these files into a save repository.
In [1] is showed mounting a bucket as file system. I tried it, but no success. I receive authentication error.
Can anyone help me to get success in order to access my bucket by compute engine nodes ?
[1] https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/gcs-buckets
Best regards,
It sounds like you did not start your GCE instance with a service account.
According to the docs you linked, you need to configure a service account or run gcloud auth login to configure your credentials for accessing cloud storage.
If you are trying to set up gcsfuse without running on GCE you will need to use the gcloud auth login approach.

gsutil copy returning "AccessDeniedException: 403 Insufficient Permission" from GCE

I am logged in to a GCE instance via SSH. From there I would like to access the Storage with the help of a Service Account:
GCE> gcloud auth list
Credentialed accounts:
- 1234567890-compute#developer.gserviceaccount.com (active)
I first made sure that this Service account is flagged "Can edit" in the permissions of the project I am working in. I also made sure to give him the Write ACL on the bucket I would like him to copy a file:
local> gsutil acl ch -u 1234567890-compute#developer.gserviceaccount.com:W gs://mybucket
But then the following command fails:
GCE> gsutil cp test.txt gs://mybucket/logs
(I also made sure that "logs" is created under "mybucket").
The error message I get is:
Copying file://test.txt [Content-Type=text/plain]...
AccessDeniedException: 403 Insufficient Permission 0 B
What am I missing?
One other thing to look for is to make sure you set up the appropriate scopes when creating the GCE VM. Even if a VM has a service account attached, it must be assigned devstorage scopes in order to access GCS.
For example, if you had created your VM with devstorage.read_only scope, trying to write to a bucket would fail, even if your service account has permission to write to the bucket. You would need devstorage.full_control or devstorage.read_write.
See the section on Preparing an instance to use service accounts for details.
Note: the default compute service account has very limited scopes (including having read-only to GCS). This is done because the default service account has Project Editor IAM permissions. If you use any user service account this is not typically a problem since user created service accounts get all scope access by default.
After adding necessary scopes to the VM, gsutil may still be using cached credentials which don't have the new scopes. Delete ~/.gsutil before trying the gsutil commands again. (Thanks to #mndrix for pointing this out in the comments.)
You have to log in with an account that has the permissions you need for that project:
gcloud auth login
gsutil config -b
Then surf to the URL it provides,
[ CLICK Allow ]
Then copy the verification code and paste to terminal.
Stop VM
goto --> VM instance details.
in "Cloud API access scopes" select "Allow full access to all Cloud APIs" then
Click "save".
restart VM and Delete ~/.gsutil .
I have written an answer to this question since I can not post comments:
This error can also occur if you're running the gsutil command with a sudo prefix in some cases.
After you have created the bucket, go to the permissions tab and add your email and set Storage Admin permission.
Access VM instance via SSH >> run command: gcloud auth login and follow the steps.
Ref: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/gce-discussion/0L6sLRjX8kg/kP47FklzBgAJ
So I tried a bunch of things trying to copy from GCS bucket to my VM.
Hope this post helps someone.
Via SSHed connection:
and following this script:
sudo gsutil cp gs://[BUCKET_NAME]/[OBJECT_NAME] [OBJECT_DESTINATION_IN_LOCAL]
Got this error:
AccessDeniedException: 403 Access Not Configured. Please go to the Google Cloud Platform Console (https://cloud.google.com/console#/project) for your project, select APIs and Auth and enable the Google Cloud Storage JSON API.
What fixed this was following "Activating the API" section mentioned in this link -
https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/json_api/
Once I activated the API then I authenticated myself in SSHed window via
gcloud auth login
Following authentication procedure I was finally able to download from Google Storage Bucket to my VM.
PS
I did make sure to:
Make sure that gsutils are installed on my VM instance.
Go to my bucket, go to the permissions tab and add desired service accounts and set Storage Admin permission / role.
3.Make sure my VM had proper Cloud API access scopes:
From the docs:
https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/access/create-enable-service-accounts-for-instances#changeserviceaccountandscopes
You need to first stop the instance -> go to edit page -> go to "Cloud API access scopes" and choose "storage full access or read/write or whatever you need it for"
Changing the service account and access scopes for an instance If you
want to run the VM as a different identity, or you determine that the
instance needs a different set of scopes to call the required APIs,
you can change the service account and the access scopes of an
existing instance. For example, you can change access scopes to grant
access to a new API, or change an instance so that it runs as a
service account that you created, instead of the Compute Engine
Default Service Account.
To change an instance's service account and access scopes, the
instance must be temporarily stopped. To stop your instance, read the
documentation for Stopping an instance. After changing the service
account or access scopes, remember to restart the instance. Use one of
the following methods to the change service account or access scopes
of the stopped instance.
Change the permissions of bucket.
Add a user for "All User" and give "Storage Admin" access.